Philip J. Hyde, 84, Conservation Photographer

By NADINE BROZAN

Published: April 19, 2006

Philip J. Hyde, whose evocative wilderness photographs, taken over five decades, became a potent weapon in the battle against environmental degradation, died on March 30 in Reno, Nev. He was 84.

The cause was complications of a stroke, his son, David Hyde, said.

The primary conservation photographer for the Sierra Club, Mr. Hyde became known for his color images of Western deserts, canyons, forests and mountains, which evoked in ways words could not what would be lost if they were not protected from development.

''His photographs were much more than beautiful landscapes,'' said Tom Turner, senior editor at Earth Justice, a nonprofit environmental law firm that is a spinoff of the Sierra Club. ''They were polemical, they were political, they were battle tracts.''

Mr. Hyde helped fend off government plans to install two dams in the Grand Canyon. In collaboration with David Brower, the forceful executive director of the Sierra Club, he completed a book called ''Time and the River Flowing: Grand Canyon,'' published in 1964, which turned the canyon into a symbol of imperiled wilderness and focused attention on the Colorado River.

''It was published explicitly to stop the federal government from allowing dams to be built in the Grand Canyon, mostly for power generation and a little for irrigation,'' Mr. Turner said. ''The text was hard-hitting and it succeeded. No one had done books like that before, and they had more impact than they would today.''

All told, he did 15 books, most of them for the Sierra Club, and contributed to 70 others. Among his books were ''This Is Dinosaur,'' about the Dinosaur National Monument in Utah; ''As Long as the Rivers Shall Run,'' about Navajo tribal lands in the Southwest; ''The Last Redwoods''; ''Island in Time: The Point Reyes Peninsula''; ''Slickrock: The Canyon Country of Southeast Utah''; and ''Drylands: The Deserts of North America.''

His last book, ''The Range of Light,'' published in 1992, included passages by John Muir, the naturalist and founder of the Sierra Club.

Philip Jean Hyde was born on Aug. 15, 1921, in San Francisco, to Leland Hyde, a painter and furniture designer, and his wife, Jessie Hyde. He was educated at Polytechnic High School in San Francisco and took his first photographs in 1938 on a Boy Scout camping trip, with a Kodak camera borrowed from his sister.

In 1942, he volunteered for the Army Air Corps and served as a gunnery trainer for three years, stationed in Kansas and Alabama. Shortly before his discharge, he wrote to Ansel Adams asking for advice about what photography school he ought to attend.

The timing was fortunate: Adams was putting together the photography department at the California School of Fine Arts, which is now the San Francisco Art Institute. He entered in 1946, studying under photographers like Edward Weston, Imogen Cunningham and Dorothea Lange.

After finishing his studies, he met David Brower, who commissioned him for what came to be known as ''battle books,'' cornerstones of Sierra Club environmental campaigns.

He is survived by his son, who lives in Taylorsville, Calif., and a sister, Betty Hyde Hughes of Spokane, Wash. His wife of 56 years, Ardis King Hyde, died in 2002.

Mr. Hyde learned he had macular degeneration in the summer of 2000, and was completely blind by October 2001, a grievous loss, his son said, ''because he was trained to see more than anyone else.''

Photo: Philip J. Hyde's 1964 image of eroded sandstone at Canyon de Chelly in Arizona. Photographs like these encouraged wilderness preservation. (Photo by Special Collections/University of California, Santa Cruz)